California’s Dreaming

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I can’t say I have a first-hand feel for what’s going on in California, since I live on the opposite edge of the country, but here’s the story:

Yesterday California voters defeated ballot proposals to deal with the state’s financial problems. These included a spending cap, extending tax increases, borrowing against lottery revenues and tapping dedicated funds.

I take it California voters want to hear some better proposals for dealing with their $21.3 billion budget deficit — something along the lines of mugging the Tooth Fairy.

Jim Christie writes for Reuters:

“The public is under the delusion that they can have everything — have potholes filled, new freeways, a good education system — but they aren’t willing to pay for it … A lot of critical services are going to be cut and there will be serious consequences,” said Jim Hawley of the Elfenworks Center for the Study of Fiduciary Capitalism at St. Mary’s College of California.

There is talk of California getting a cash bailout, along the lines of what’s been thrown at Wall Street. I’m inclined to say no. If the citizens of California are not willing to tax themselves to save their own state, I think they should live with the consequences. This is not like a business failure, in which the bad decisions of a few executives cause a ripple effect of more failure that impacts many blameless people.

Juliet Williams writes for the Associated Press:

Political observers say Schwarzenegger and lawmakers will have little choice but to go after even politically sacred programs such as schools. …

… The choices facing the governor and Legislature are daunting,” said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. … Many Californians have been hearing about the state’s budget problems but have yet to feel the severity of the crisis. That will soon change, Pitney said.

“For a lot of people, the budget’s been an abstraction. But with the next round, there will probably be serious consequences, particularly in the schools,” Pitney said.

Last week, the governor said he will consider shortening the school year by seven days, laying off up to 5,000 state employees and taking money from local governments, which likely would translate into cuts to police and firefighting services.

Only 19 percent of California’s voters bothered to vote, Williams says.

Michael Finnegan writes in the Los Angeles Times that voters share the blame for the California’s dysfunction.

Nearly a century after the Progressive-era birth of the state’s ballot-measure system, it is clear that voters’ fickle commands, one proposition at a time, are a top contributor to paralysis in Sacramento. And that, in turn, has helped cripple the capacity of the governor and Legislature to provide effective leadership to a state of more than 38 million people.

Clogged freeways, the decline of public schools, an outdated water system and a battered economy are just a few of the challenges demanding action by state leaders. Instead, they are consumed by yet another budget crisis, one that voters worsened Tuesday.

“No one’s really stepping back and confronting the harsh realities that face our state in a critical sense, because of constraints put on our elected leaders,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California. “We’re unable to focus on the long term and the big picture at a time when we desperately need to do so.”

Finnegan’s analysis is very good; I recommend reading all of it.

It’s worth remembering that the Reagan Revolution effectively began in California with the passage of the infamous Proposition 13, which capped property tax rates. Once upon a time California was considered one of the best-run states in the nation, and with the best public school system. In the 1960s California’s schools were ranked first in the nation. Now they are ranked at number 48. Way to go, California.

Update: Via John Cole — Megan McArdle writes,

There is a surprisingly sizeable blogger contingent arguing that we have to bail them out because however regrettable the events that lead here, we now have no choice. But actually, we do have a choice: we could let them go bankrupt. And we probably should.

I am not under the illusion that this will be fun. For starters, the rest of you sitting smugly out there in your snug homes, preparing to enjoy the spectacle, should prepare to enjoy the higher taxes you’re going to pay as a result. Your states and municipalities will pay higher interest on their bonds if California is allowed to default. Also, the default is going to result in a great deal of personal misery, more than a little of which is going to end up on the books of Federal unemployment insurance and other such programs.

But on the other hand, Megan argues, if we bail out California, it would amount to shoveling money into a bottomless pit, and ultimately we’re not helping California by enabling the “lunatics in Sacramento.” But in California’s case one can’t just blame Sacramento. California voters and the referendum system have made the state ungovernable. And I’d like to point out that many other states allow referendums without being as irresponsible as California has been.

Update: Rightie bloggers are rejoicing this outcome and see it as validation of conservatism. Just wait until the 2010 midterms! Allahpundit laments that voters “love their government goodies even though they manifestly can’t afford them.”

“Government goodies,” of course, are things like decent public schools, a criminal justice system, firefighters, bridges that don’t fall down, etc. America used to be able to afford those things. “Used to,” as in “before Reaganism.”

Around the Corner With the GOP

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Michael Steele says the Republican Party has turned a corner. Is this the same corner we used to turn in Iraq? If so, all they’ll find around the corner is another corner. Anyway, among other brilliant things Steele says, in effect, that the party should move forward by being faithful to Reaganism.

I’m so not worried.

However, the Pelosi episode shows us that the bitter enders are fighting to the death. And they’re brazen as ever. They admit they created a phony controversy about Nancy Pelosi and torture to distract people from a real debate about torture, and so far it is working for them.

White Whales and Wingnuts

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A lot about wingnut behavior begins to make sense if you understand that in their reality, they are Captain Ahab and we liberals and progressives are Moby Dick. They don’t all want to kill us (a disturbing number do, of course), but mostly they are driven to settle the score with us.

What score? you may ask. The score for whatever they imagine we did to them. It’s not clear to me what that is, but clearly it’s the fire burning in their bellies; their raison d’être. For the Right, life is one long, monomaniacal quest to get even with the Left.

Thus, you can count on them not quitting even when they’re ahead, because in their own minds they are never ahead, or at least never ahead enough.

Along those lines — one of the weirder aspects of the ongoing torture scandal is the way the Right has tried to make it a referendum on Nancy Pelosi. I don’t entirely agree with Matt Yglesias that the Pelosi argument is backfiring. Not yet, anyway. But neither do I think anyone who hasn’t signed up to sail on the Pequod, so to speak, cares about whether Nancy Pelosi was briefed about torture or not.

However, I also think Matt has a point that they could have just accepted President Obama’s wish to move on from the torture question and keep their mouths shut. But they couldn’t do that. They couldn’t pass it up any more than a dog can pass up a tree without saluting.

Steve Benen:

Republicans were getting exactly the result they wanted, right up until they thought to go after Pelosi. Now, the liberal Democratic House Speaker and the conservative Republican RNC chairman are saying the same thing: let’s investigate and get the whole story.

Indeed, Pelosi has been using this to great effect. When the right argues that she’s lying or was somehow complicit in Bush’s alleged crimes, she always responds with the same compelling answer: “Let’s have an investigation and see who’s right.”

As far as the strategy goes, Republicans should have taken “yes” for an answer.

Think Gollum diving into the lake of fire to grab the ring.

Now, I also agree with Steve M that the Right can still control news cycles and still finesse the terrorism question. But the Right does tend to come unglued where Nancy Pelosi is concerned.

See, for example, John Feehery’s “Conditions for a coup in Congress” at The Politico. Feehery’s evidence that House Democrats are on the edge of replacing Pelosi are, um, old. Steny Hoyer ran against Pelosi for Majority Whip in 2001, so he’s a potential rival. The base must be pissed at Pelosi, because Cindy Sheehan ran against Pelosi in 2004.

Yes, a lot of lefties are disenchanted with Pelosi, but a lot of lefties are disenchanted with a lot of people. I think if the base were given the authority to replace somebody in Democratic leadership, the first on the list would be Harry Reid, not Nancy Pelosi.

David Weigel at the Washington Independent calls the Feehery piece a “curious case of media narrative-setting.” Whatever. Feehery is reason itself compared to Mike Huckabee:

Here’s a story about a lady named Nancy
A ruthless politician, but dressed very fancy
Very ambitious, she got herself elected Speaker
But as for keeping secrets, she proved quite a “leaker.”

Which, I submit, says a lot more about Mike Huckabee than it says about Nancy Pelosi. And what it says is damn pathetic. Notice the dig about a woman being “ruthless” and “ambitious.” That’s another tree the Right can’t pass up.

Regarding what needs to be investigated — see Marcy Wheeler’s “The 13 people who made torture possible.” Sorta kinda related — Gary Farber, JAVAID IQBAL.

The Notre Dame Speech

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I read the text of President Obama’s Notre Dame graduation speech, and as usual it was a fine speech.

I’m glad he spoke directly to abortion, and that he made it clear that when he speaks of reducing the number of abortions he means to do it primarily by reducing the number of unintended pregnancies. So often “abortion reduction” and “common ground” are code words for “we’re going to nibble Roe v. Wade to death with stupid abortion restrictions.”

Frances Kissling writes,

By stressing a long-standing Democratic Party commitment to preventing unintended pregnancy and supporting pregnant women who continue pregnancies under a new name — “reducing the need for abortion” — he got most of these Catholics to vote for him in 2008.

Still, Obama yoked the strongest possible feminist affirmation of the right to choose abortion to his message of abortion reduction — and many pro-life Catholics voted for him anyway, a sign of how disgusted they were with the Republicans. At an April 29 press conference the president explained why he is pro-choice in terms that most feminists would applaud. “The reason I’m pro-choice is because I don’t think women take [abortion] casually. I think they struggle with these decisions each and every day. And I think they are in a better position to make these decisions ultimately than members of Congress or the president of the United States.” A feminist theologian might tweak the language, but the bottom line is that the president’s theology is feminist. Women are moral adults and agents; they think about abortion in complex and thoughtful ways and they should be trusted to make the decision. The president has not waffled on abortion.

I’ve said many times that what really separates people who want to criminalize abortion and those who don’t is not whether they think a fetus is a person. It’s whether they appreciate that a woman is a person. “Women are moral adults and agents; they think about abortion in complex and thoughtful ways and they should be trusted to make the decision.” Exactly. To me, terminating a healthy pregnancy is a sad thing, but reducing women to the status of brood animals is a lot sadder.

Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times that the President “appealed to partisans on both sides to find ways to respect one another’s basic decency and even work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.” Baker also said,

Anti-abortion leaders protested his appearance at the University of Notre Dame and he was heckled four times during a commencement address by protesters yelling slogans like “abortion is murder.” But the audience shouted down the hecklers and cheered Mr. Obama as he called for “open hearts, open minds, fair-minded words” in a debate that has polarized the country for decades.

Meanwhile, Randall Terry was seen on campus pushing a baby carriage occupied by a doll covered in blood.

Peter Baker mentioned a recent Gallup poll that shows a rise in the number of people calling themselves “pro-life.” Ed Kilgore and Matt Yelgesias explain why the poll is misleading.

Personally, I liked this part of the President’s speech, even the “G” part:

But remember, too, that you can be a crossroads. Remember, too, that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It’s the belief in things not seen. It’s beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us. And those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.

And this doubt should not push us away our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, cause us to be wary of too much self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open and curious and eager to continue the spiritual and moral debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame.

Reinhold Niebuhr, big time.

Update: See E.J. Dionne:

The thunderous and repeated applause that greeted Obama and the Rev. John I. Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president who took enormous grief for asking him to appear, stood as a rebuke to those who said the president should not have been invited.

The Unrelease

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I’m about to butt heads, and not with righties. I understand there’s a lot of anger at President Obama because he changed his mind about releasing more prisoner abuse photos. I respect a difference of opinion on this matter.

But I also think the reason given for the reversal is understandable — commanders warned that the images could set off a deadly backlash against American troops. Even if it’s only a small chance this would happen, I might have made the same decision President Obama made. If something could stir up more violence against U.S. troops in the Middle East, and doing that something isn’t absolutely imperative for the survival of the nation, I would think twice about it, too.

Thers writes, “So there will never be a “good” time to release them. Release them now and face the music.” The ones “facing the music” are in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while there might never be a “good” time to release the photos, there ought to be a “better” time, which is after most troops are withdrawn.

I realize this isn’t going to happen right away. But, at the same time, it isn’t as if we don’t already know there was terrible prisoner abuse, some of which caused deaths. I don’t personally need to see any more photos. I can barely look at the ones that are in circulation already.

So, I don’t think the President’s decision necessarily means that he’s got a Dick Cheney microchip planted in his head. What’s more important is that there are investigations into who ordered what, and who knew what, and who approved what.

Bush: The Reformer With Results

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Just published at the Washington Post —

The number of babies being born out of wedlock has increased sharply in the United States, driven primarily by significant jumps in women in their 20s and 30s having children without getting married, according to a federal report released today.

More than 1.7 million babies were born to unmarried women in 2007, a 26 percent rise from 2002 and more than double the number in 1980, according to the report from the National Center for Health Statistics. The increase reflected a 21 percent jump in the rates of unmarried women giving birth, which rose from 43.7 per 1,000 women in 2002 to 52.9 per 1,000 women.

That means that unmarried women accounted for 39.7 percent of all U.S. births in 2007 — nearly four out of every 10 newborns — up from 34 percent in 2002 and more than double the percentage in 1980.

Well, so much for the Healthy Marriage Initiative, not to mention the Abstinence Only Until Marriage programs. On the plus side, if we need to find junk to cut out of the federal budget, I have a couple of suggestions.

However, it appears the Obama Administration has adopted the Healthy Marriage Initiative rather than kill it. Please, just de-fund the blasted thing.

Sticks and Stones

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The head in The Politico says “GOP, RNC to rebrand Democrats as ‘Socialists,'” which made me wonder if I’d enter some Star Trek time warp-loop anomaly. Wasn’t the “S” word the big gun that was supposed to save the McCain campaign last summer?

But the story is that the RNC is going to vote on a resolution that will rebrand the Dems as the “Democrat Socialist Party,” and force party chairman Michael Steele to use that term whenever referring to the Dems. Steele is on record as believing the “Democrat Socialist” idea is just dumb.

As Ron Beasley says, “You know what a sorry state the Republican Party is in when Michael Steele is the voice of reason.”

I’m wondering what happened to the old standard insult, “liberal.” Twenty years ago, it was the only code word the GOP needed to defeat Michael Dukakis. But now it seems the word “liberal” has not only been drained of meaning; it’s been drained of connotation, color, inference, and association as well. It’s now as bland as cottage cheese. Who’s afraid of the “L” word any more?

I can’t imagine “socialist” is exactly the firebomb it once was, either. It’s been a long time since red-baiting was the sure-fire way to win an election. It was replaced by race-baiting at least 40 years ago. But then race-baiting was replaced by feminist-baiting, atheist-baiting, gay-baiting, and most recently immigrant-baiting, and the voters aren’t biting the way they used to.

But maybe the GOP is on a nostalgia kick. Wake me up when Eric Cantor says Nancy Pelosi is “pink right down to her underwear” (said by Richard Nixon of Helen Gahagan Douglas, California Senate race, 1950).

System Failures

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Robert Pear writes in the New York Times that the recession is draining Social Security and Medicare of funds faster than expected. If current trends continue, Medicare will be out of money by 2017 and Social Security by 2037.

The situation with Medicare is especially bad news, coming at a time when we’re finally on the edge of maybe enacting real health care reform. Medicare’s situation will be more ammunition the Right will use to protect the private health insurance industry.

My fear is that we’re looking at cascading system failures. Everything is breaking down at once, and we can’t fix this until we’ve fixed that, but because that is failing we lack the resources to address several other things, etc. Government may not have been drowned in the bathtub, but it lacks the strength to stand up and dry itself off.

It may be that it’s too late to pull the nation out of the pit it’s in, and that hardships are going to continue to pile up for the next few years. That’s a possibility I think we have to face.

I haven’t seen much discussion on the blogosphere about this yet. For the past couple of years discussion of the looming shortfalls of Social Security in particular were actively shouted down as a right-wing talking point and not a real problem. However, it always has been a real problem; just not a problem that a health economy and some tweaking of the income cap couldn’t fix in time to avoid disaster. Now, not so easy.

Well, if you find any commentary that sheds light on this situation, please let me know.

What Is the Purpose of a Health Care System?, Part II

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Last week I proposed there were two answers to the question “What is the purpose of a health care system?”

A. Provide health care
B. Support a profitable health care industry

I’m not opposed to a health care system that does both, but not if Purpose A is compromised.

Apparently Sen. Chuck Schumer is attempting to craft a “middle ground” that compromises Purpose A in order to support Purpose B. A New York Times editorial explains Schumer’s plan:

Any competition between a new public plan and private plans would be waged on a regulated field of battle within a new health insurance exchange. Most reform proposals envisage the exchange as a place where individuals unable to obtain coverage at work and ineligible for existing public programs like Medicaid could buy policies that would be available to everyone without regard to pre-existing medical problems. Low-income people would get subsidies to help buy a private or public plan.

Opponents of a new public plan have raised the specter that it might have unfair advantages that would enable it to draw customers from private insurers and ultimately drive them out of business, leaving virtually all Americans enrolled in a full-fledged single-payer system, like Medicare. That prospect could be mitigated by appropriate ground rules.

Now, get this part:

Senator Schumer, a Democratic member of the crucial Senate Finance Committee who was assigned to study the issue, has come up with some reasonable principles to ensure that any competition between a public plan and private plans would be a fair fight. In general, he suggests that a public plan should have to comply with the same rules and standards as private plans.

Because, you know, we cannot be unfair to the private insurance industry, even if it means compromising the health of citizens.

The public plan could not be supported by tax revenues or government appropriations but by premiums and co-payments. It would have to maintain reserves, like private insurers, and provide the same minimum benefits as all other insurers in the exchange. It could not compel doctors who want to participate in Medicare to also participate in the new public plan. And it would be run by different officials from those who run the insurance exchange to lessen the likelihood that federal officials would give unfair advantages to their program.

Because, you know, we cannot give unfair advantage to a public system, which means the public system will be priced out of reach for many people. Yes, it says “low income” people may qualify for subsidies, but we sort of have that now. It’s called “Medicaid.” The income ceiling for qualifying for Medicaid is so low that vast numbers of people who can’t afford health insurance don’t qualify for Medicaid, either. I am not hopeful that low-income subsidies for public health insurance would be any different. Let’s forget about putting people through the indignity of qualifying for subsidies and make the bleeping insurance less expensive, period.

I just sent Sen. Schumer — one of my senators — a message explaining to him why he can go to hell, btw.

And the New York Times editorialist is no less clueless:

Mr. Schumer is on the right track. It should be possible to design a system in which public and private plans could compete without destroying the private coverage that most Americans have and for the most part want to keep.

I don’t think most Americans give a hoo-haw about private versus public coverage, as long as they can see a doctor when they need to. People who have insurance now and can see a doctor when they need to don’t feel a need for change, but if their insurance was publicly funded and they could still see the same doctors they are seeing now, I very much doubt there would be riots in the streets because the government isn’t being fair to the private insurance industry.